The Mentalist – Recap & Review – 18-5-4

photo: cbs

The Mentalist
18-5-4

Original Air Date: May 6, 2010.

Liz – Associate Staff Writer
liz@thetwocentscorp.com

Everybody loves a clown. Unless you’re poor Noah, a math genius with a crippling phobia of clowns who is being chased through a park by a clown who wants to murder him. Clearly, the fear has not proven to be an irrational one.

By the time CBI is there, Noah is dead, his index finger cut off and removed from the scene. But why? To send a message? We’re not sure, but that’s hardly the strangest thing about this case. What is strange is the gaggle of clowns (is there a name for a large group of clowns?) that are congregating where the crime scene occurred, all drawn there by an audition ad looking for clown talent — a clever ploy. A clever, creepy ploy.

Noah is survived by his wife Daphne and brother Rafe, who describe Noah as a genius but not much in the way of social skills. As a result, he wasn’t teaching, but was supposedly day trading to help financially, otherwise they were dependent on Daphne’s job as a waitress to survive. Lisbon and Jane also meet Tolman Bunting, a man and puzzle aficionado that Noah had been communicating and playing chess with. Jane quickly opens up his own chess game with Bunting — figuratively and literally. Asking about Noah’s behavior, Tolman reveals he’d asked to bet on their chess game, which he had never done before.

Grace has been pulling out her computer mojo and finds that while Noah claims he’d been day trading, there is no browser history or money changing to confirm this. He was, however, sending someone by the e-mail address of bslayer e-mails containing a string of seemingly random letters and numbers.

While they wait on that, they receive a phone call from Daphne who claims to have come home to someone in the house. Things are clear, except for in the bedroom — ransacked, with Noah’s missing finger abandoned on the floor under the dresser. Lisbon uses the finger to open an unearthed safe in the middle of the room. The only things in the safe were a Spider-Man comic book, some papers, and a chess set — a cheap chess set. Jane starts poking around, and discovers a locker key hidden in one of the pieces.

The mysterious bslayer is soon revealed to be Adrian Mosca, who tries to run out when the CBI arrive at his doorstep. Having never heard of the CBI, he believes them to be bad guys sent to collect on a bet he’d apparently defaulted payment of. Cho educates him: “We’re like the FBI only more conveniently located.” Damn, I love Cho.

Mosca had met Noah in a coffee shop, and they struck a deal: Noah would pick winners in various events for Mosca to bet on using his mathematical prowess in exchange for ten percent of the winnings. Except for the last three weeks, every single pick that he’d made had turned out to be wrong, and Noah had made the excuse that he couldn’t concentrate. What would present this kind of problem for someone like Noah?

They go back to the puzzle shop and with some envelope pushing, Jane manages to bring the true nature of Buntings’ operations out. In their back room, they have computers running and Tolman is not running just a puzzle shop. He’s running a business that provides security — making or breaking through it — as an independent contractor of sorts. Noah was one of three candidates that Tolman was courting to make a device to decipher any encrypted file — the universal hack — for a price of two million dollars. Supposedly, Noah had completed it but was not going to hand it over.

In a nearby mental institution, Oliver McDaniel is the third genius Tolman had been grooming for his device. Oliver of course, despite believing himself to be the smartest person in the room, manages to give Jane every bit of information he needs to know in order to track him down when he escapes from the institute under everyone’s noses.

Jane finds Oliver at a beachside resort (he asked Lisbon for a massage, the sound machine in his room played sounds of the beach, and a room in the hotel had ordered an obscene amount of spaghetti-os. Down at the pier, the team is tracking Oliver who they believe is there for the device. Unfortunately he gets injured by a shady looking gentleman, who is then caught breaking into locker forty-two. Lisbon and Cho give chase (and catch him, of course — it’s Tolman Bunting, come for the device) while Jane stays behind and uncovers the device — not in locker forty-two, but in a locker whose coordinates are four over, two down.

Oliver has an alibi for the morning that Noah was murdered, but he still proves useful. Jane offers him spaghetti-os for the chance to play with the device, and clearly that is the way to the guy’s heart.

Jane takes the device to Tolman with Daphne and Rafe, who are now the owners of the device. They give it a shot before paying out, but it doesn’t work. In an ensuing moment, Daphne tightens something on the device (a modification Jane let Oliver make) while Tolman is distracted and convinces him to try it again. This time it works, and the encrypted message reads: MY WIFE KILLED ME. Jane has once again tricked the criminal into incriminating themselves. I have to think he takes pleasure in it, there’s no other way. Daphne was angry when Noah wasn’t going to hand over the device for any amount of money, and felt looked down on for her supposed lack of intelligence.

Bunting, still eager to get his hands on the device, brings all the legal paperwork showing the device is his, with Daphne going to jail and Rafe not wanting anything to do with it, so Jane hands it over… in pieces. Jane must hear “You’ll be hearing from my lawyer!” so many times that it doesn’t even have meaning anymore.

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